


Un (Prayer For Claude Hooper Bukowski)

by Gildedmuse



Category: Hair - MacDermot/Rado/Ragni
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Niche Fandom Fic, One Shot, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-16 05:51:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18685417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gildedmuse/pseuds/Gildedmuse
Summary: I want to yell: I am not Claude Hooper Bukowski. I cannot be labeled and placed among the others, put up on the shelve in easily alphabetical order. I am a new son, rising up - up - up into a new world.





	Un (Prayer For Claude Hooper Bukowski)

**Author's Note:**

> [I had this saved but I don't know when I first wrote it or where I originally posted it.]

**Un (Prayer For Claude Hooper Bukowski)**

 

My mother has a family photo album. Yeah, like one of those big dusty old things kept in the living room no one is suppose to really live in. You can even tell it's our family, because no one ever smiles. No one. Just like my parents.

 

"Good stock." They are not people, but trophies to my father. He always points out the tallest, the biggest of them, the ones who look more like statues of the perfect, unoriginal man than actual humans of flesh and blood and thoughts. He points at them and says, "Now there was a true Bukowski, Claude. See, that's the good stock you come from."

 

I want to shout: NO! I was not picked out from the backroom in shoved into their lives, just another model of the same usual same old same. I am real and flesh, an unseen force that cannot be packaged away in cardboard and carbines. My family cannot be found on one single tree. Mine is buried - down deep into the mother Earth as roots, sucking her precious milks into our bones and binding us together. They bloom across continents and all lands and call us their children. We do not descend, but ascend, reaching out from our giving mother towards the sky. We grow wild and beautiful, unconcerned with the boundaries put up by these numbered people.

 

They burn lines through our Earth to create war and hate. We know only unity and peace.

 

I want to yell: I am not Claude Hooper Bukowski. I cannot be labeled and placed among the others, put up on the shelve in easily alphabetical order. I am a new son, rising up - up - up into a new world.

 

But that's all in Jeanie's voice, Shelia's words, not my own. They won't make it up in my throat. They echo around my head in her voice, strong and sure and when I try to speak out they can't find air.

 

Instead I could tell him how I have no family, or that I am the brother of everyone. I could say I stand on their Earth alone. I should tell him that cold, dead photographs are nothing. That what matters is what is here, what's warm or - no - what's burning with life and passion and blood.

 

Every man and woman I meet could be a mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, third cousin, lover or they could be all those in one perfect moments where our bodies and minds melt and we are. So long as they are there and real enough to touch I am theirs. So long as I can hold onto them, and when they're gone I will find another warm body to connect with. To love. To adore me.

 

It sounds thrilling when Berger whispers these things into my ear, voice and hands rubbing my soul raw. This is after I tell him about the album and my parents and those things Shelia would have said that get stuck in my head and throat. Berger's words sound real and powerful and possible and slip my mind moments later, distracted by these things not thoughts.

 

The truth is my parents are my parents and I can't change that, or don't want to. They see me as the son of the assembly line. My awakening is nothing but a malfunction, and they only continue to love me under the assumption that I can be sent back and fixed right. Made to work like a real boy, number 1005-9632-97.

 

Standing between my mother and father, I know what they see and expect and everything is easy.

 

Between the others, my true family that digs into their Earth, things get more complicated.

 

Jeanie seems pretty sure of her astrocosmic knowledge, she speaks from the universe to us. If she's right, then Berger is my mother. There was nothing, and then there was Berger, and these at last light. He formed me from the blackness. He took the plastic model and made him flesh - burning and living. His breath on my skin made me aware. I was a babe straight from the womb. The darkness I called home - gone - and into the world of color and sensation before unknowable. There was no need for words or thoughts or education or cold, only a warm body to suckle from.

 

According to all official records, my mother gave birth to me in some dirty Queen's hospital, just the latest branch of a dead old tree. In truth, it was George Berger who bore me into this life.

 

Of course, Shelia is my father. My sky God. My unreachable, untouchable, unknowable, un- un- un-.

 

I was seventeen when we met, but Shelia's were the first words I ever heard. Hers was a voice of authority and truth, not to be confused with the false power of teachers government doctors parents and every other person trying to mold young Claude's plastic life. In her voice were the sublime truths, all that was and could be, all the harmonious strings of this universe could be drawn from her words.

 

Shelia taught me the secret to all of life. My father who arch at NYU, hallowed be thy. Impart upon thy only son all the hidden realities we fail to see, and lead me into temptation. Amen.

 

That's me. The son between the two. I grew out from mother Earth, taking in her sweet soil to survive, but I am only one of millions and he will always have more. Will never, ever need me the same life or death or rebirth way I need him. I reach out and claw from the dirty up to my father in the sky, but can only give her my unquestionable, unenlightened faith. I bask in her light but only because she gives it so freely to the Earth and the Earth gives to all and I am inconsequential in this cycle. Unholy. Unknown. Unseen.

 

Mommy, daddy. Why don't you love me like I love you?

 

In this old photo album everyone is dead. Dead and the color of dust. Shelia and Berger are vibrant, full of all the colors of the universe and life. They burn the eyes and through them. All the way through me. They boil my blood over and over until it's electric heat and they turn my flesh to sound my voice to glow. They pour over me until I melt away---

 

I am their son, their unholy union. Father, oh mother of all, forgive my sins. I have laid with my parents and it was beautiful, but they do not love me. Not with the same undying sense. Not with unquestionable stillness of these emotions. The sort of love no man with their plastic products can pack away and move, reship to some other land and new people.

 

Oh father. Oh mother. Here is your son! Your creation! Your boy! Here is your son, on, un.

 

Unloved unknown unfixed unseen untouched unhot unplastic under you I am everything and nothing and entirely certain and unsure.

 

Because I them I have seen all knowledge and between them I am lost to the confusions of this galaxy.

 

God, this is why I get high. So I don't have to have these thoughts.

 

I want to see all the infinite truths of this universe from a distance. I want to strum along the harmonious threads that connect all life, run through the entire human race, but I don't want to see my own - splintering off between Berger and Shelia (and mother and father and Jeanie and Hud and the tribe and the government and the Vietcong the government wants me to kill and the red Russians that want to kill me and the whole of every living soul!) I want to be invisible to all to know them and be untouchable. I do not want to fight. I do not want to shame. I do not want to be torn apart by the unrelenting love but not love of my parents as they fight for each other's attention with me, their Vietnam land.

 

They made me fleshed and then used me as trenches of battle. They unmade me man.

 

Creation and destruction. Cyclical like it should be, but I want no part of it.

 

God, grant me peace, serenity, and a way out. Oh holy Buddha, make me unseen.

 

Amen.


End file.
